The first time I stumbled across the term with in a 1999 issue of Newsweek with an article entitled “The Truth About Tweens.” I remember squinting at the headline assuming that I misread “teen.” Further down the page however, was a profile Maja Kahn — a 12-year-old tween with an ever-changing sense of style.

The age bracket is a bit murky given that a tween can be any child from five years old to 12 depending on which commercials your watching, making the range quite wide. But the development of a new childhood cohort in the name of product pushing is hardly anything new. The term “toddler” was developed in 1936 as a way to sell more clothes to children by distinguishing a new phase of life from infancy. Much like how tweens are being presented to their families today, Depression-era mothers were told that their toddlers were individuals with differences closely tied to sex and gender. Daniel Thomas Cook writes in his book The Commodification of Childhood:

…the toddler is an emerging person whose “likes” and feelings count as much as those of anyone else. Boy toddlers and girl toddlers are different from each other, of course. The girls manifest femininity in “dainty pastels and adorable prints” and boys’ garments are more “tailored,” more mannish for their “poise of mind”…the toddler herself or himself is now a person available for scrutiny by others whose feelings, needed, poise of mind, and choice are being discovered and invoked as legitimate authority. The toddlers are concerned with how they look and are more than aware of the distinction between “proper” and “improper” dress.

Interestingly, a lot of the language Cook uses to convey how toddlers were marketed to mothers is also being used when describing a tween. Children in the tween bracket are often said to have emerging tastes, opinions, and feelings that are both being discovered and asserted particularly with products.

The $43 million industry of tween-dom has assumed the center stage for marketers and parents alike, all curious as to how to cope or sell to this new division of childhood.

Their average weekly allowance is $9, and the bulk of their personal money comes from gifts from parents and grandparents. And there is more money here because parents will spend money on their children. And tween income is truly more disposable. I don’t believe that a teenage income is totally disposable, because mom will say ‘you have to contribute to your cell phone bill’ or ‘it’s time you started saving for a car.’ Tweens will say ‘I’ve got $20 and I’m going to Justice and I’m going to spend it all.’

What is telling about Wells’ observation is not only how tweens have disposable income, but also how independent tween kids are. Tweens are revered by marketers for the web-savvy capabilities, their quick navigation of social media, and their sophisticated use of mobile phones. Children well under the age of Facebook’s age requirement (13 years old) are developing an online presence, communicating in formerly adult arenas: 7.5 million of the 20 million under 18 Facebook users are younger than 13 years of age. With texting, Facebook messages, and online participation, tweens are representative of a smarter, faster generation that has more at their fingertips than kids ever have had before.

Tween clothing has co-opted this problematic common ground of “ambiguously sexualizing” clothing which says a lot about the epidemic, Orenstein explains to me:

So many of those clothes have “sassy” written on them or are off-the-shoulder or emphasize body parts that are someday going to be sexual. [This] normalizes the idea of sexiness in childhood and that’s what tween [for girls] is really about. Increasingly defining girlhood through appearance and play sexiness…through consumption and self-absorption.

Orenstein also observes that the word “tween” in itself is an attempt to shorten girlhood by introducing commercialized sexuality:

“Tween” really is a term that has been developed to commodify and create a child consumer out of an age of girls. It’s really a way to inappropriately foist a kind of premature sexuality on them because most tween products are about little girls being allegedly more grown up and wanting makeup and clothes that are less child-like and “teenager-ly.” It means sexier and sassier and that’s just what “sassy” is — “sexy” with training wheels.

Boys themselves, at a younger age, have also become increasingly self-conscious about their appearance and identity. They are trying to tame their twitching, maturing bodies, select from a growing smorgasbord of identities — goth, slacker, jock, emo — and position themselves with their texting, titillating, brand-savvy female peers, who are hitting puberty ever earlier.

A comment by Wells in the aforementioned interview touches on this very technique:

I think that [tweens] all seek acceptance, and they all find a piece of who they are based on the brands that they like. Brands matter to them and become part of their DNA.

Lyn Mikel Brown, a psychologist at Colby College and an author of Packaging Boyhood, observed that “the products [give] boys the mere illusion of choice,” but in fact advocate a hyper-masculinity for developing boys:

These are just one of many products that cultivate anxiety in boys at younger and younger ages about what it means to man up…to be the kind of boy they’re told girls will want and other boys will respect. They’re playing with the failure to be that kind of guy, to be heterosexual even.

Presenting “independence” and “choices” to children in the form of products or online channels is, according to Orenstein, a “false sense of autonomy.” When reflecting on her own experiences as a mother, she says that autonomy to her means that her daughter will walk to her piano by herself or take part in day came in the woods where she learns physical strength and self-determination.

“That’s the autonomy that our children have lost,” says Orenstein, “and we’re substituting this other medium that is far less healthy.”

I agree with everything you’ve pointed out, but it’s not an a-ha! realization that marketers find ways to make people part with their money. The issue is more, why do some kids and parents buy into this crap (sexualized girls’ clothing, label obsession etc)? Is it any wonder that some kids end up on the hamster wheel of shopping-shopping-shopping, when their parents are status-obsessed, competitively shopping label whores, too? My 9-year-old doesn’t buy into any of this nonsense, and neither do we (her parents). We spend our considerable disposable income on travel, outdoorsy adventures, organic food and clothing-wise, we buy quality clothes purchased for style and function–but not endlessly obsessed over. It’s just stuff people–put it in its place and your kids will too.

Mom2Boys

I totally agree with the title of this posting… it says it all for me.

It took me while but nowadays I am so grateful my parents vetoed my attempts to grow up too fast. Granted, it was more during my teens than my tweens, but still. The first time I got a manicure I was 17 and it took quite some convincing, and my first heels were a present for my 19th birthday.

My mother had absolutely no problem letting me draw on my jeans and converse and paint self-pitying poetry on my walls, or have a group of teenage kids “reharsing” terrible songs in the house, because it was part of being 16. However, she did not think it was appropriate for a 16 year old to dress and act like a 20 something. And I am oh-so grateful she had that clarity.

This is why I am glad that I will be homeschooling my daughter…with limited television time, most likely will use DVR for television shows that she would be interested in so I can fast forward through commercials!!! I will not even allow my daughter to use the term tween, she is a kid until she is 15 then she will be classified as a semi responsible young adult.

Crowther Amanda-Beth

Tween is 9-12 though A I hesitate to call 13-14 yr olds teenagers. Their are more age groups then have names and ws our understanding grows we will add terminology get over it.